


damnatio memoriae

by bam_cassiopeia



Series: damnatio memoriae [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Obligatory TLJ Trailer Fic, Psychological Drama, Temporary Amnesia, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 12:39:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12433047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bam_cassiopeia/pseuds/bam_cassiopeia
Summary: Kylo Ren loses and regains his memory. Rey helps, or maybe she doesn't.In the end, it doesn't matter; there is only the Force.





	damnatio memoriae

 

It’s Leia who tells her the news, the day everything goes sideways. Rey would rather be sleeping; she’s tired, she’s just escaped the medbay and all she wants is for the day to end. But Leia wanted to see her and so there she is. Dwarfed by the massive desk between them, the General seems tired, nearly frail, the way she only does in private on truly bad days.

“He’s stabilized now,” Leia says, and Rey’s heart skips a beat. “He’ll live – but the medics haven’t ruled out long-term complications from the head trauma. You didn’t kill him, Rey.” There’s no accusation in her voice, only comfort Rey doesn’t want. Behind her desk, Leia takes a deep breath. “He woke up an hour ago. I was there, in case – in case…”

Leia puts her head in her hands and cries silently. Rey doesn’t know what to do. What to say.

“He doesn’t remember much. Not you, Rey. I’m sorry.”

 _Don’t be_ , Rey swallows back. _There’s no reason to._

She takes Leia’s hand, holding too tight or maybe not enough, awkward even in this. Leia’s hand is clammy in hers. She doesn’t seem to realize that Rey isn’t sad at all, that her only regret is not delivering a killing blow when she could have.

 

***

 

When she asks about him, the medics throw around terms like head trauma and retrograde amnesia and possible brain damage and unknown effects of Force sensitivity, but the only one that matters to her is _temporary, most likely._ It sounds like a promise of closure, something to wait for while she waits to be cleared for the field.

She would need time to recover, the medics had said after Chardaan, a polite fiction to cover the fact that they don’t trust her control. They say nothing of that to her this time, and she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t ask anyone about that, not even Leia. She doesn’t tell anyone that twice since Chardaan, she’s woken to find her few possessions floating in the air either.

When Finn leaves for another mission, she tells him it doesn’t bother her to stay behind. “It won’t last long. They’re just coddling me,” she lies. He can probably see through it, but he wouldn’t call her out on it.  

“I hope so,” Finn says, but there’s no conviction in his words.

“Good luck out there.” The rest is stuck in her throat. _I wish I could have your back this time too, I’ll miss you, don’t worry about me_. She steps in for a hug instead, and all too soon Finn is gone and she’s left with nothing but her own thoughts, the wary looks she can’t escape, and the thing within her trying to force its way out – to taste freedom again.

 

***

 

She finds him in the small room he’s been granted in the building that serves as hospital – probably to keep him away from everyone else as much as to keep an eye on him. He’s allowed to come and go, the medics told her; the only way to get off the planet is through the base’s hangar, and should he try they’d implanted him with a tracker, old Hutt tech retrofitted to incapacitate rather than kill. _General’s orders. He hasn’t shown signs of aggressivity for now_ , a young Mon Cal had said, her tone betraying she’d like him to be, _but someday… Well, that little beauty in his neck can put him to sleep in two seconds. Not that you need it_ , she’d giggled, more nervous than admirative.

Garbled in pale grey that doesn’t suit him, he’s nearly unrecognizable. Simple clothing; nothing like his old layers. Kylo Ren would have felt naked without their protection, she thinks, but maybe Ben Solo doesn’t.

He’s barely glanced at her, eyes empty of recognition. He doesn’t know her. She’s no one to him, and her jaw clenches at the thought. He’ll say her name again soon, Rey knows; but he’ll probably never call her _scavenger_ again – a world of meaning behind a few syllables.

That should be a good thing. It is. He’s just not dead.

She’d thought he was, when the link between them had snapped, pain flaring, her whole self on fire, the Force screaming in agony as she fell into darkness. It’d left her reeling, small and alone and lost and so, so angry.

It would have been better for him to die. She doesn’t know the man wearing his face. She doesn’t know what hides under. She doesn’t know that Kylo Ren isn’t still inside, somewhere, waiting, watching.

“Ben,” she says, the name foreign on her lips. It’s his real one, but it feels wrong nonetheless, just like the hollow stare and the stillness. “ _Ben_ ,” she says again when he doesn’t react, annoyance rising.

At that, he finally, finally, looks at her. “Oh,” he says, dry and sardonic, and for a second she thinks he’s recognized her. Her hand goes to her waist, where her ‘saber would be if she hadn’t been forbidden to bring it inside. His eyes track the movement. “Let me guess. You’re my long-lost sister and you’re so very happy I was found?”

“No,” Rey says, and she doesn’t try to hide her distaste at the idea. “We’ve never met. I’m just here to show you around.”

No one’s asked her to do that, but she wanted to see him unarmed and weak.

 

***

 

“I don’t remember much, really. Something went wrong, I think?”

Rey snorts. “Something like that.”

He looks away, hands curling into fists. She feels his tension rise, sees the way his shoulder hunch. A defensive posture. They’re not linked anymore, but she knows him. She wants to kick that sad face, but she has to remember that the man before her is not Kylo Ren. He’s not really Ben Solo, either, but as names go, it’s a better one to start over with. They won’t let the past weigh on his future and his recovery, or risk to awake his memory too early. High Command had agreed on that, although Rey doubts they would have without Leia.

She thinks it’s stupid. When people look at him, they see Kylo Ren. They see the First Order. A name isn’t going to change that.

 

***

 

She doesn’t have to spend time with him. Leia would understand if she didn’t. So would everyone else. _No one_ wants to spend time with him. She does it nonetheless. It’s easy in a way, easier than trying to connect with people who fear what she can do with the Force. She doesn’t like him, not really. He’s too silent, too watchful, reminiscent of a cornered beast. But it just means she doesn’t have to care about hurting him, or even about what he thinks of her. When she’s with him she can nearly trick herself into believing that all the distrust and fear is directed at him, and none at herself.

And when Kylo resurfaces, she’ll be there, ‘saber ready.

That day can’t some soon enough. In the meantime, she tries to remember to call him Ben. She fears the day she’ll slip-up, the day she’ll forget to be careful. She hasn’t yet, but someday, if he doesn’t snap first, she will.

She brings him to meet people. She says, _this is Ben, he doesn’t remember much_ , and introduces him to pilots and mechanics and analysts, people whose family Kylo Ren killed, people who bare their teeth in a semblance of a smile trying to go along with the farce. She says, _this is Finn and this is Poe, my first friends, they’re the nicest people I know_. Ben Solo nods and says hello and doesn’t quite manage feigning friendliness. Leia smiles and says _my son, my beautiful son, back from obscurity_ , and everyone nods in false happiness and Ben Solo looks at the ground and pretends he believes the tension around him is normal, pretends he believe Rey ferries him around because she’s just that nice.

She isn’t, not even when she gets him new clothes. Black. Nothing like Kylo Ren’s old garb, of course, but black all the same. It makes him look more like himself, which isn’t a good thing, but it’s better than the pale, ghostly greys Leia had first chosen. _He told me he prefers it_ , Rey tells Leia when she objects. It’s true, and if there’s more to it, Rey isn’t ready to discuss it. Leia doesn’t push; she hopes to make her son feels like he belongs here, that even if his memories come back he’ll stay. Rey understands why she would cling to that hope. She also knows Ben’s tracker was Leia’s idea, the one thing that convinced the other Resistance leaders to go along with that plan instead of keeping him in a cell. That, or the touch of the Force lacing the General’s words.

Rey thinks _Ben, Ben, Ben, that’s his name, don’t you forget_. She shows him around the base, the forest outside, the paths she’s explored and the ones she’s made, the streams and the clearings. She doesn’t tire of the landscape: of the innumerable shades of green, the light filtered through the tree canopy, the smell of chlorophyll and the hint of old rotting leaves. Few people ever venture as far from the base as she does, so it’s just her and Ben, Ben who follows her like a tall, silent shadow, hunched and dutifully listening. She asks him what he remembers, which the healers said she shouldn’t, makes the right noises at the right moment, and lies through her teeth.

 

 _Ben’s finding his marks_ , she tells Leia, who thanks her for helping. It’s not what Rey’s doing, and she wishes she felt guiltier about that, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t say much to Finn beyond _I’m keeping an eye on him_ , which is closer to the truth than she’s told anyone, but Finn’s rarely around, and when he is, they have nicer things to talk about. She doesn’t say much to his friend Poe either, because he’s not around much either, and when he is, he’s with his own friends, and Rey doesn’t think they like her very much. He’s doing well, she tells the healers.

He's not. He talks too little, and when he does he’s polite and formal and distant, always on his guard. He’s not blind; he must see the hate in people’s eyes, feel the resentment around him. If something’s going to jolt his memories, it’s _that –_ not her questions.

 

***

 

“I’m worried for you,” Finn tells her. He’s leaving again, for some operation she doesn’t know about in detail because she hasn’t set foot in a meeting room in weeks. Her presence just makes things awkward. Everyone’s waiting for her to ask when she’ll be allowed out again when she knows she won’t – not after Chardaan and what she did there. It’s all they see when they look at her. It frightens them, she thinks.

“Don’t be,” Rey says. “I’m doing fine. Using all this free time to train,” and it’s true. Her duties are limited to showing up for meals and the rare times Leia asks for her, so when she’s not fishing answers out of Ben, she trains with her ‘saber. Luke had at least let her keep it, the one good thing to come out of their meeting.

“Yeah,” Finn says, smile bright. “You’ll get so buff you’ll kick Snoke’s butt in no time.”

Rey snorts. “We’d have to know where he is for me to do that,” because she doesn’t need to attend meetings to know that the Resistance doesn’t know where Snoke is, doesn’t know where the First Order operates from, and has few resources to spare to find out. Even without the Starkiller Base, the Order is spreading, planet after planet, system after system. It’s only a matter of time before it closes in on the Resistance and devours it.

“We’ll find out,” Finn says, serious again. “And we’ll end this.”

 

 _It was nice of him to say we_ , Rey thinks, watching his ship grow smaller and smaller. She doesn’t doubt he would tell her if he knew, although she doubts anyone else in the Resistance would. Not even Leia. Not anymore.

It’s alright. She won’t tell them either, when she’ll have wrestled the location from Kylo Ren’s mind, just before the killing blow. Turning the table on him, one final time.

She doesn’t wait to see Finn’s ship turn to a dot and finally disappear in the blue of the sky. It’s not like there’s any point to it, and Ben must be waiting for her in the meadow she’s chosen for training. They don’t spar, not yet, and she hasn’t let him touch her ‘saber once, but he’s been giving her pointers. Part of her wants to tell him to stop, because it means he watches her – too intent, nearly staring, in a way that’s too reminiscent of Kylo Ren. She likes Ben best when he doesn’t remind her of him.

She doesn’t like Ben much, in truth, and she likes him least when he gives her advice, but there’s no one else to teach her, so she grinds her teeth and even pretends to believe him when he says he thinks he remembers the forms and exercises from his time with Luke.

She knows it’s not true. She doesn’t need to have trained with Luke to see that; she’s fought Kylo Ren, and that’s who he’s teaching her to move like.

 

“Do you remember?” she asks him once. “Fighting? The war?”

She’s not supposed to ask him that – Ben Solo disappeared as a teenager, officially, and no one expects him to have acquired any experience in war, much less remember it now. He doesn’t go to meetings or on missions, of course, and he’ll never see a battlefield again. Not if Leia can help it.

“No,” Ben says, but there’s a tell-tale rigidity to his shoulders.

“Liar,” Rey says, but she doesn’t put any bite into it, because all she can think of is the crackling noise of his ‘saber, the exaltation when their blades crossed. Maybe he won’t get to wield one ever again. It’s almost a good thought.

She never thought she’d feel pity for Kylo Ren. Or a man who used to be him.

 

***

  

Leia wakes Rey in the middle of the night, saying something about _meeting_ and _important_ , and that’s how, eyes still crusty from sleep, Rey finds herself in a room crowded with the Resistance’s brass. Half-awake, she listens to jubilant voices recount how Finn and his unit had caught up to Phasma as she was meeting with Hux. Phasma herself had escaped capture, but Hux hadn’t, and he was on a ship, on his way to the base.

Rey makes a point to smile along with everyone else. It’s good news, but there’s no reason for her to be here, now, when she has nothing to contribute. No one’s said it yet, at least not to her face, but she’s a liability now. She hasn’t left the base in months, and she’s just as unlikely to be sent on a mission as Ben Solo, because everyone’s afraid she’ll lose control again, afraid that the next time she won’t stop at crushing empty X-wings with her mind.

She can’t really fault them for that.

 _Too much power,_ Luke Skywalker had said on Ahch-To, _like a spring coiled too tight, waiting to escape_. What he had to teach wouldn’t help, he’d said when she’d asked, nearly begging. _Go away,_ he’d said when she’d insisted, and after forty days of glum silence and dark looks, she had.

 

 

“Rey, would you stay?” Leia asks, and Rey blinks realizing the room is emptying. She dozed off, and feels a bit guilty for it.

“Sure,” she mutters, nervous. This must be about why she’s really here.

What Leia tells her is that she’s decided to send Ben to another base, a small surveillance outpost. She doesn’t want to take the risk of him seeing General Hux, but it’s not the only reason. There are too many people here, too much risk of a misstep. Ben’s bad for morale, and if his memories do come back, it would be best if it didn’t happen in the middle of the Resistance’s HQ. Leia tells Rey it’s what she should have done from the beginning.

Rey doesn’t want to tell Leia that yes, she should have done that, or better yet that she should have let him die. “I’ll go with him, then,” she says instead, not because it’s probably what Leia wants to hear, but because it’s what she wants to do. She’s not in denial, she knows the amnesia’s temporary, and she knows that if anyone’s going to kill Kylo Ren when he comes back, it’s herself. “It’s just as well,” she adds. “I’m my own kind of danger, after all.”

Leia winces. “I’m sorry, Rey. I – I’ve never had reason to regret my own lack of training. But now I wish I –“

Rey cuts her off with a hug. It’s easier than words, easier than to try hiding her bitterness. Leia’s frame feels slighter than the last time she hugged her, but her back is straight, her own hold tight. She smells like flowers and blaster shots and unshed tears.  

Rey lets Leia go. “We’ll leave in the hour,” she says.

 

*** 

 

The trip takes two relative days. She spends the first three hours arguing with herself, and then Ben joins her, sitting in the previously empty co-pilot’s chair. His eyes are red and puffy, from his own goodbye to Leia probably, or from being in the Falcon. He’s bringing her a rations bar because she hasn’t eaten, has she, and that ends her internal debate.

“Forget about the rations,” she tells him, getting up. She’s going to kill him; what they do in the meantime doesn’t matter, and if she wants this for all the wrong reasons, it’s not like it matters either.

Surprise wipes the slight hurt off his face when she straddles him. “I have a better idea. It starts with you taking your clothes off.”

“No objections here,” he croaks, and blushes when she starts tugging his shirt up. “Just so you know, I think I’m, hum. At a disadvantage.”

“You’ll catch up,” she says, and for the rest of the time it takes to reach Phôn and its small base, he tries his best to do exactly that. He lets her explore him and taste him and peel off every layer of his being, and the sheer satisfaction of it is almost enough to drown the power howling deep within her bones.

 

*** 

 

There’s only a crew of six on Phôn, all of them twi’leks. Probably a family. Rey wouldn’t know, because they keep to themselves and their radar surveillance work. They don’t need to say it for Rey to know that she and Ben are at best a distraction to them, at worst a danger. _It doesn’t matter_ , she tells herself. They won’t stay long. There’s a landscape of green hills to explore around the base, and she can almost make herself believe she’s happy in this exile, can almost forget the thing in her trying to claw its way out, almost ignore that control isn’t getting any easier, that the mornings she wakes to find everything not nailed to the ground in her small room floating in the air grow more frequent.

Ben hasn’t said anything about it, but he knows, and although he didn’t say why, he’d offered to guide her through meditation exercises. It helps, and in exchange she pretends to believe him when he says he remembers them from his childhood.  

 _Sparring could help_ , he says one day, and so they try that as well. It doesn’t really help, and it could jostle his memory, which she should care about. But the exercise feels good, it’s good training, and she doesn’t care. He fights just like Kylo Ren, as she’d expected, and every hit she scores is deeply satisfying. The wooden sticks leave dark, purple bruises.

It’s far from the worst they’ve done to each other.  

 

She knows it can’t last. She’s living in a bubble as artificial as her relationship with Ben, and in the end, it’s her who pops it. It just takes forgetting once. _Kylo_ , she cries out, so raw it’s almost unintelligible, when his fingers find that spot inside her. His mouth crashes against hers, sloppy and hungry, and she thanks the Force he didn’t notice.

But of course he did.

“So who’s Kylo?” he asks in the morning, and it’s smug. Rey’s heartbeat stutters one, twice, and spikes; from dread or anticipation, she doesn’t know.

“You _know_ ,” she realizes. One glance confirms he’s standing at the threshold of the hallway leading to their room. He knows her ‘saber is there. He’s blocking her path to it. His arms are crossed, deliberately casual and ostensibly non-threatening. He’s not armed either, not that she can see – still, he’s bigger than her, stronger than her. If she wants to take him out, she’ll have to be fast, not leave him any time to fight back. She doesn’t really need a weapon to do that. She didn’t the last time, on Chardaan; after that kick had sent him fleeing, she’d just had to slam that masked head again and again and again against the rocky ground and if their bond hadn’t snapped _just then_ , she’d have finished him.

“You did your best to help me remember, scavenger.” He smiles at that, like they’ve just shared the funniest joke.

“Not really,” she says, but it’s a poor lie. “Maybe.”  

_“Let’s try your training with Luke,” Rey asks. Her toes wriggle in one of the streams that run near the base. Small grey fishes dart around her feet. “Do you remember any of it?”_

_“No more than what I already told you a hundred times,” Ben says, curt and annoyed._

_Rey bumps his shoulder. “I’m helping. Be nice.”_

Something’s wrong there, disorienting, and Rey shakes her head. The memory dissipates. Across the room, Kylo Ren is smiling like he’s just proved his point, and – ah. That memory wasn’t hers.

When she reaches for it, the link between them is there, scarred over and raw, but there. She tugs on it, half-expecting nothingness, because she can’t not have noticed that, she _can’t._ For a second nothingness is all there is, and then she can feel his shields drop and there it is, his mind pressing against hers.

“You rebuilt it, not me,” he says before she finds words to throw at him, and now that she’s aware of the link again, she knows he’s not lying. She knows how she did it, and when.

That first time in the Falcon’s cockpit. She’d reached for him too, then.

One of the screens at her left explodes in a shower of sparks. _I did that_ , Rey thinks, distantly. Kylo barely glances at it.

“I can help with that,” he says. He doesn’t mean the screen.

“That’s why you stayed.” She doesn’t need him to answer to know it’s true. “You know exactly what I’m planning. And you stayed.” He stayed for _her_. He stayed because there’s something wild inside of her, something primordial that only wants for her to shed her human skin. Something she barely controls, can barely contain. It’s what scares Luke Skywalker, it’s what scared the Resistance after Chardaan, but it doesn’t scare him.

No one else is going to give her that.

“What about Snoke?” She knows already, she thinks. She just wants to hear it.

“He’ll know, if I go back. That I didn’t try to bring you to him.” The rest goes unsaid. He doesn’t think he’ll survive that encounter, and the bitterness there is nothing and everything, like the one that colors her thoughts of the Resistance.

She takes a step towards him, and it’s enough. She can feel his nervousness when he reaches out to her, palm up, shaking just enough for her to notice. There’s something comforting in that. Her hands are shaking, too.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> way back when, I fell upon a prompt for a reylo fic in which kylo ren would get amnesia and join the resistance and wham! redemption. it's taken two attempts, a year of languishing in the 'crap' folder and a final shot of inspiration from the TLJ trailer but finally i'm done with the distorted mirror version.
> 
> many thanks [@holocroning](http://holocroning.tumblr.com) for betaing the thing, the story would have been poorer without her.
> 
> (find me squeeing over the war in the stars on the [tumble](http://and-then-bam-cassiopeia.tumblr.com) \- i'm more quick to answer there as well)


End file.
